Hour of the Wolf
by dblauvelt
Summary: Abandoned in a series of seemingly unrelated places, the 5th Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan are hunted by a creature from the Doctor's past... and future (story takes place after Snakedance).
1. Part 1 The WatchTower

**Part One**

**Namibia, 2012**

Tegan was annoyed.

The Doctor had made some parting comment about that being Tegan's "default setting" and had then ambled off to lecture the group of students that trailed around him, hanging on his every word.

That only annoyed her further.

Tegan shifted the towel over her face to block out the glaring morning sun and wriggled in her sun chair. She was tired. And thirsty, and worst of all Nyssa had stopped coming round with fresh glasses of iced tea. She'd promised to come back, but it seemed as if Tegan's foul temper had managed to drive away the most patient woman that Tegan had ever met.

Tegan sighed, her breath poofing up the towel briefly before it settled back onto her face.

It had all started out so cute. It really had.

Studying the _Suricata suricatta_ as the Doctor had called them would be a great way to examine mammal behaviour, while at the same time providing a 'lovely vacation.' With that introduction, Tegan had groaned inwardly. Nyssa, however, had seemed so excited that for once Tegan kept her mouth shut. A suitably rare event that did not go uncommented upon by the Doctor. Nevertheless, the TARDIS promptly plonked itself down in the middle Kalahari Desert. The Ship parked right beside a cluster of tents erected by students and volunteers who spent their vacations, and thousands of pounds, furthering science. None of the students, nor their leader, Dr Cavanaugh, so much as blinked at their arrival – which only furthered Tegan's suspicion that the Doctor had some sort of mind control powers, or at least some sort of spray-thing that made everyone love him. Well, nearly everyone.

Initially sceptical, the _Suricata suricatta_ turned out to be meerkats, and they were absolutely adorable. Over the next few days Tegan actually found herself enjoying assisting the volunteers and students who were collecting behavioral data of the clan, taking notes of the little buggers as they foraged for food and mated. The furry guys seemed to forage all day, with a watchful sentry making peeping and other strange noises. While, the ability of the meerkats to munch on venomous scorpions was a little unnerving to watch, the sight of the baby meerkats, no bigger than mice, climbing out of their nests for the first time were so despicably adorable that Tegan actually squeaked with delight.

The creatures seemed used to the presence of the scientists, although Tegan was a little less than thrilled to find that her Armani bag was quickly 'marked' by one little guy who seemed to constantly be just out of arm's reach of the rolled up newspaper that she'd taken to carrying. She'd named him Adric for a variety of reasons.

That had been ten days ago. After a week in the desert and sleeping in tents with scorpions, snakes and other insects flitting about, adorable only went so far with Tegan. Boredom had set in. She'd been through all the good books in the TARDIS library and was down to leafing through a -probably very naughty- picture book dedicated to the lifecycle of the Acturan mega-donkey. As she slipped in and out of sleep in the chair, she felt the book slip off her lap and thump into the sandy desert floor. There was a brief pause, then the rustle of Adric scenting the new arrival and knocking over the dregs of her glass of tea, probably resulting in the ruination of Megadonkey text.

Under the safety of her face towel, Tegan found herself thinking that it was a good thing that the TARDIS library didn't have a librarian.

'Did you know that according to popular belief, the meerkat is also known as the "sun angel"? It was thought that they could protect the village from the moon devils, otherwise known as werewolves.'

Speak of the devil. 'You know, that info-blurb was utterly fascinating- the first three times you told me. Now, less so.'

'Do I get the impression that your enthusiasm has waned a bit?'

'Doctor, I get it. I do. This has been a great vacation after recent... events...' Tegan made a point of not mentioning anything about the giant snake in her head that had recently worn her body like a finger puppet. Again. 'But I'm fine, really.' She lifted the edge of her towel up and stared at him, partially blinded by the sun blazing overhead. 'It's okay. I'm okay... I'm ready. Let's move on. Literally.'

'Hmmmm...' The Doctor met her gaze for a long while, the only sounds in the air the peeping of the meerkats and the dull whine of insects. 'Indeed.' He shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and turned to survey the horizon that was clumped with the many hills of the meerkat colony. 'We'll be off soon enough. Dr Cavanaugh seems to think the next batch of volunteers will be arriving in a day or two so we can push off then.'

'Another day of spag bol?'

'I'm afraid there are greater dangers in the universe than facing beef-based pasta dishes... besides, my bolognaise is considered quite a delight in some parts of Italy. '

Tegan pulled the towel back over her face and let out a long, dramatic sigh.

'And Tegan?'

'Yes?' She flipped up the towel, hoping he'd changed his mind and that they'd be on the first Gallifreyan time ship outta here.

'Please do clean that book up before you put it back in library would you? It's a first edition- and please remember to close the TARDIS door, the last thing we need is a bunch of space-travelling meerkats ...'

* * *

**Wales, 1995**

The PM grabbed a coronation chicken sandwich at Spartacus, wandered down Pier Street and strode the promenade of Aberystwyth. His wasn't really a PM, of course, but he found out that's what the local shopkeepers had dubbed him the Pigeon Man after ten months of coming here every morning to sit and stare at the sea and toss old bread to the birds. He liked the anonymity of it, and it was just as good as his name. There was no one left to use his proper name, not for a very long time. No one who mattered any way.

The wind, chill and gray, spat at the waves that broke upon the stony beaches on the shore before him. It was early November and the high season with its throngs of tourists had come and gone; the pier was virtually empty. This was how he liked it. Even if he hadn't intended to come here at all today. However, after a late morning spent perpetually shoo-ing his tabby, Susie, off his laptop keyboard, he had given up trying to draft some letters. He gathered up his bag and overcoat and headed slowly down to the little town for some lunch and the only thing that he could do lately: escape...

There was a woman on his bench today, bundled up in a checked coat and paisley scarf, intently focused on her book, ear buds dangling down into a radio or cassette player hidden by the folds of fabric. She looked up at his arrival and nodded her head in greeting although evidently annoyed. She went back to her book as he settled himself and his satchel on the bench and took hesitant sips of his scalding coffee.

The PM looked out to the sea. His eyes were drawn to the endless horizon and his thoughts, as they always did, found their way back to his wife. Grief, he found, passed away like a bruise, nothing but a dull ache that faded with time. Longing, however, persisted. A pain that drained his soul. Longing for her often burned with every step, often coming from out of nowhere, knocking him sideways sometimes. Today, it was the cold wind of the sea that brought him back, that sent him on his way once more. Aware of himself again, he pulled his coat tightly around him and reached for his coffee again.

The woman was gone, he noticed at last, and a slow patter of rain had begun to tap and patter lightly down around him. There were no birds today which, was odd although perhaps they sensed the oncoming storm. With a reluctant sigh, he pulled himself up and made his way along the promenade towards the rounded hilltop, Pen Dinas. Atop, lay his goal _Castell Aberystwyth_. Or what remained of it.

Once the greatest in all of Wales, the castle was built during the first Welsh War and completed in 1289, yet all that remained today was ruins. Castles could survive many battles, defeat many armies, defy many kings, yet they always lost to Time. Time, and the need for the town's population for handy building materials that plucked apart the castle block by block. Of course, being ordered to be blown up in 1649 speeded the process up a bit. He picked his way through the trimmed green grass, stepping over the stones of the inner walls and made his way towards the only remaining portion of the structure: the old North Tower.

Crossing the circle of bardic stones, one representing for each of the old counties, he paused to take a sip of coffee from his thermos. As he did so, he turned around slowly, ensuring that there was no one about. Satisfied, he tucked the thermos back into his satchel and continued towards the tower and nipped into its shadows. Pen Dinas had been the site of a fort dating as far back as the Iron Age, yet had he stepped inside it then, or today, he would have known the trembling sensation in an instant. He had felt it when he's first stumbled upon it here as a tourist visiting three years ago. He placed his hand on a familiar stone, felt the air shift around him, and stepped into another world.

The PM stepped out onto the floor of a cavern, its polished surface worn out of the rock as if by wind or water, although there were neither here in this vast room of choices. There were doors of all shapes and sizes, though most nothing more than the gaping mouths of darkened tunnels.

The PM sat in the center with his knees crossed, his jacket serving as a blanket, his satchel lying on its side. He chewed slowly savoring his sandwich, enjoying the soft warmth of the French bread and the cool taste of the chicken, broken intermittently with of sips of bitterly strong coffee. So many choices. Some of the doors he had marked with chalk: this one lead to a forest in the Upper Yangtze, another to Bethune's Gully in New Zealand, that one to the great Maiombe tropical rain forest in Angola. The door back home, however, he had marked in indelible ink 'HOME' to prevent any mistakes, and hewn a notch along the side with his pocketknife to be doubly sure he could find it even in the dark.

He had been through many of the doors and found they lead to many times and places across the history of both men and beasts. He had only ever returned to five however. Five particular doors that led nowhere but to quiet places that lay far from worlds of men and politics and monsters. There was one door that he always wanted to find, but knew he could never find. He had all that ever was, and all that could ever be at his feet, but none of that interested him anymore. He'd seen it all before and he was far, far too old for any of that nonsense. No. He came here only to do what he loved best, to do the only thing that provided any comfort to him anymore.

If only he could go back... if only...

Shaking himself back to the present, he scrunched up the remainder of his sandwich wrap and fumbled with his satchel, spilling his coffee in the process. He dropped the bag momentarily as he wiped away the coffee from his jacket, before he pulled out the bag's contents searching for napkins. In his confusion and haste, he didn't see the little marble roll out of his back, bouncing silently into the darkness. After sopping up most of the mess, and finishing the last of the coffee, he packed up his satchel, stood up slowly and walked through his favorite door.

After it closed behind him, there was nothing but silence. And then slowly, without a sound, another door began to form.

* * *

**Namibia, 2012**

'What drew you to study these mammals in particular?' Nyssa fiddled with the video camera, tilting the lens downward to get a better view of the burrow. Although there were at least fifteen entrances and exit holes scattered about the dusty red scrubland, Dr Cavanaugh had selected this one to be monitored. Dozens of other cameras covered the other openings, but she'd invited Nyssa to come observe this one, as it was the one where the pups frequently appeared. Only six weeks old, they often stumbled hesitantly out of the burrow and into the warm sunlight.

Dr Cavanaugh grinned from beneath a fringe the colour of charcoal, stained with ashen streaks of age and tinted with the red brown dust of the desert sands. 'Aside from the cuteness factor you mean?' She scribbled in her field book, making note of the time, weather and participants.

Nyssa frowned slightly. 'I'm not certain that a scientific scale that measures 'cuteness' exists, nor would cuteness be a logical factor in selecting a species for empirical observation.'

'In a purely objective world, that would be true,' Dr Cavanaugh replied, smiling at Nyssa's bizarrely Vulcan-eque response. 'However, cuteness attracts tourists, tourists bring money, money brings research and research gives results, and publications... which will let me keep my job at uni.' She glanced around the camp, squinting in the afternoon sun. Surrounding them were a mixture of students and wealthy tourists, all huddled around the meerkat colony, their energy and excitement still palpable even after nearly two weeks of dust and heat.

All around them meerkats bathed in the sun or foraged for food, doing their normal routine, normal everyday things, but extraordinary to their human observers. The meerkats were aware of their presence and kept the humans always in sight: the dark patches around their eyes served to reduce glare and increase their ability to see long distances, while the horizontal pupils provide them with a wide range of vision, yet they seemed not to be bothered. Not after so many years of teams that came again and again to document their smallest sneeze and snooze.

Even with scientific objectivity always guiding her observations, Dr Cavanaugh couldn't help but admit she was smitten with them, even after nearly twenty years of field seasons. 'Our uni does run another program that focuses primarily on slime eels, but shockingly, very few people are willing to shell out two grand to spend their holidays collecting hag fish...Meerkats, however, not only pay the bills, but are adorable to boot!'

Financial realities in regards to scientific research seemed absurd to Nyssa, and Dr Cavanaugh had heard her spout these opinions repeatedly. Nyssa had answered, more than once, with something along the lines of 'much of this world seems strange, and thanks to Tegan, I learned long ago not to probe too deeply into your society with logic.' Although this response was beyond strange, Nyssa seemed so completely convinced about it that Dr Cavanaugh let it go.

So many people came to the camp on holiday, all seeking to escape their humdrum lives, their dull jobs, to live a more exciting reality- if only for a short time- that she'd learn to let many comments go unremarked upon. She noticed Nyssa's eyes flicker back to the den and Nyssa let out a little 'oooooo' as the five tiny pups emerged from the burrow as another meerkat approached, something odd dangling from her mouth.

'That's the mother,' Dr Cavanaugh explained, 'bringing a scorpion back to the pups so that they can learn how to feed. Notice how she jumps about about, tempting the pups to take the food from her mouth. She's bitten off the stinger until they're old enough to hunt them on their own.'

"I have seen this act several times already Dr Cavanaugh," Nyssa replied evenly. "I am aware of the relevance of the act.'

Dr Cavanaugh could detect no trace of irritation in Nyssa's voice. She was merely stating a fact, in a calm and patient tone. It was the reason that Nyssa was the favourite of all of the members of the camp. Nyssa was completely drama free. It was very refreshing. "Nyssa, please I've told you before, please call me by my first name, Oshadagea, or Osha at the very least. While my father was English, my mother was Iroquois."

"Oh," replied Nyssa with a blank look.

Osha had come to the conclusion several days ago that when Nyssa was faced with anything that did not have strict scientific relevance to a conversation, she would shut down. As if she was trying not to draw attention to herself... Which, Osha considered, was fairly comic given the fact that Nyssa walked around the desert in a crushed velvet suit and high heeled boots. It also more than a little odd was odd how Nyssa never seemed to perspire, and how the fabric never seemed to get dirty. Sand just fell away from it, as if they'd just prefer be somewhere, anywhere, else.

Osha jotted down some more notes. Before several, dramatic, life events, Osha had been an industrial psychologist, and while the members of camp always provided good material for her mind to chew on, the three latest arrivals were unlike anything she'd ever encountered. She might get more out of this expedition that just another meerkat publication.

Osha, having seen the scorpion display numerous times, turned her gaze back to the camp where the Doctor stood over Tegan's reclining form, a chair she'd rarely left in several days. 'You know, I had an uncle once,' Osha began hesitantly, 'still have one I suppose, but he stayed with us in Canada, after he came back from the war... just for a while, but a few months after he got back, he seemed... dull to the world, couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate and was irritable all the time...' Osha had only been a teenager at the time, but her uncle's stay had left quite an impression, particularly the shouting in the middle of the night. The same muffled shouting she'd heard Tegan cry out when she was asleep. 'Which reminds me of Tegan...'

'Not surprisingly,' Nyssa nodded. 'Although it would be difficult to discern given that those character traits are pretty much Tegan's baseline. However, you are correct in your deductions; Tegan has recently suffered... a traumatic event. I am quite concerned for her. The Doctor, of course, insists that all she needs is time. He's usually right about these things, although admittedly, interpersonal communication could hardly be considered his forte.' Nyssa fiddled intently with the camera, snapping off shot after shot.

It seemed that Nyssa was not going to be more forthcoming in regards to Tegan. However Osha had another line of inquiry to follow... Tegan suffering from PTSD was one thing, but then there since there was the young blond man with the bizarre pyjama trousers and the salad lapel, and this seemed as good a segue as any. 'Ah, yes. The Doctor...'

'What is that sound?' Nyssa cut her off. The constant, low peeping sound of the watchman had abruptly stopped, followed by a frenzied barking sound. The pups had already vanished back into the burrow. Tourists and students started to scatter, running in all directions in panic.

'A warning call, but I really don't know- I've never heard anything like it before.' Osha scrambled to her feet, her eyes casting about the sky looking for falcons or eagles, the meerkats constant predators. It was then that she became aware that the sound was coming from that odd blue box. The box that she was only noticing now because the light on top was flashing in a frantic strobe of panic. The box that she'd never really ever noticed even though she'd walked past it hundreds of times. What the hell was that box doing here in the middle of the desert? Next to my tent?

'The Cloister bells,' she heard Nyssa gasp. Then to her astonishment the timid little woman was up and running, sprinting, going faster than seemed possible. Osha found herself following, struggling to catch up as first Tegan, then the Doctor, then Nyssa stumbled through the narrow wooden doors.

Then, carried by her own momentum, she found herself falling into the darkness...

... and emerged somewhere else.


	2. Part 2 Rainfall

Osha had to admit that when she'd stepped through the door of the dusty blue box, the last thing she expected was to see a beach, blue sky and green alpine forests. Osha had asked to step back through the doors to go back to Camp Meerkat, but the doors back seemed to have vanished completely as well.

To be fair, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan seemed far more put out about this situation than she did. It seemed to be taking them a while to adjust to the journey. Since arriving, the trio had done little more than argue, pointing vehemently around them saying strange phrases like 'Console Room', 'block transfer' and 'Where the hell is my wardrobe?' The bizarre series of screeching noises that Tegan was capable of making was impressive, but tiresome. After trying to get everyone to negotiate peacefully, Osha gave up and parked herself on a log by the beach and just tried to enjoy the view. The clouds were light and fluffy and the cool breeze was a welcome relief after weeks in the desert. She took off her boots and let her toes wriggle in the pebbly sand a bit.

After about a half hour or so of their 'discussion', Tegan stormed off down the beach, with Nyssa in pursuit. A tired, rather downbeat Doctor plopped himself beside her on the log, pausing only to dip his finger into the lake water. 'Interesting,' he exclaimed before popping the finger into his mouth. 'New Zealand... South Island...Lake Poteriteri if I'm not mistaken... I haven't been here in ages. I think.'

'So... you can tell where we are by tasting the water?' Osha held back a sigh, but pulled out her notebook and started rummaging through her pockets for a pen to take more notes. She might get a seminar out this trio...

'Well, mineral content, salinity and ambient temperature... it's a rough guess. Lacustrine geolocating isn't an exact science...'

'I rather doubt it's a science at all, at least not one that can be performed with your tongue,' Osha countered. 'Mind you, considering we were in Africa less than an hour ago, colour me impressed.' Osha could sense that the Doctor wanted desperately for her to ask questions, but she found that pained, yearning look to be quite tedious. She'd seen it in the faces of dozens of CEO's at her old job, mostly when they had her at a disadvantage, which she didn't like at all.

At least sitting by the lake shore was very relaxing. The lake was surrounded on all sides by steep, forested slopes that were broken only by the odd U-shaped glacial valley. It was breathtaking, if a trifle chilly. She really wasn't dressed for this. 'I'll tell you what's even stranger...' she pulled out her mobile, 'this is a quad-band phone... I can get reception nearly anywhere, except Japan... and here...' She paused, giving the side of her phone a slap with her palm, 'I get only two bars of signal.'

The Doctor frowned and snatched the phone, stared at the screen, sniffed it, then popped the back off and started fiddling with its innards. 'Very odd. We're here, but we're not... we can't be...'

He was obviously fishing for her to ask what he meant. Instead, Osha poked around in one of her pockets, found a cereal bar she'd been saving for a post-breakfast snack and started munching.

They sat in silence for quite some time.

'Do you notice anything strange?' The Doctor asked eventually.

Osha assumed that the question probably wasn't related to the celery bizarrely affixed to his lapel and considered the question. Besides, she liked that he was the one asking her questions. 'Well, excluding the fact that we travelled thousands of miles in an instant by stepping into your lab equipment cabinet... I had noticed that if you look closely you can see here at the shoreline the wind is blowing; wave action is actively eroding and depositing sediment, as it should. I've never seen some of these species of vegetation, yet as I've never been to New Zealand before that's to be expected. However, despite the large number of flora...'

'... there are no insects, no birds, no fish... in fact no animals of any kind,' the Doctor finished. He picked up a handful of pebbly sand and watched it fall through his fingers and scatter on the beach. 'However, the environment is quite real, no pixilation, in fact there are no indications of any virtual reality at least. Yet this is definitely not Earth...except it is...'

Osha started poking around in her bag for a breath mint. She'd put them in there this morning, however everything had gotten tossed about a bit during the running and, what was the expression he'd used? '_Temporally dislocated via the transducer matrix_'. She found a Mentos lodged at the bottom of the bag, picked away the fluff and sat quietly sucking away while watching the breeze tease the edge of the lake. The sun would be setting shortly; and it would be cold. The skin on her legs was already speckled with goose bumps. She brushed off the sand, re-socked her feet and started the awkward lacing process. But she remained obstinately silent.

It was less than forty-two seconds before the Doctor started babbling out explanations and theories. Osha let him talk, let the words rush around her. Having three children had taught her patience. Having five grandchildren had taught her that when her input was needed, it would be asked for – and that was rare indeed. Through his flow of words, she gathered that his blue box had been a ship that held many rooms, and all were now gone. Originally, the Doctor thought that the inside of his ship had been made to look like where they were now, yet if he was still in his ship he 'would know'. Therefore, they were somewhere else, somewhere he'd never been, yet it had been made to look like a glacial valley in New Zealand. Or maybe it was.

All of which, Osha acknowledged in her head, was quite wonderful, in a way that she could not have imagined when she woke up this morning. The world was new, again. And as old as she was, it was changed once again. As the world had a tendency to do. Which again was wonderful. Better still, the Doctor did not seem to think that her meerkats, nor the team was involved or harmed in any way. Yet he had no way of returning to them, at least not yet.

The Doctor's words eventually drifted into silence that sat uneasily at her feet. Then something around them happened that made Osha smile. 'Doctor,' she held out her hands, palm upwards. 'Did I ever tell you what my name means?'

'Oshadagea,' the Doctor breathed, pronouncing every syllable perfectly and translated: '_Will rain down water again_.' He unfurled his hat from his pocket and jammed it on his head as raindrops softly pelted the sand around them.

'Yes... yes it does,' replied Osha, surprised once more. One of her tiresome CEO's or beleaguered academics, the man was most certainly not. Today was certainly going to be a record day for surprises. It was only as Osha reached for the sun umbrella in her satchel that she saw what the rain brought with it-

'_Run!_' was all she heard as the Doctor wrenched her to her feet and they sprinted for the forest.

But terrified as she was, Osha knew that no one could out run the rain itself.

* * *

It had taken away so much.

Tegan stumbled through the forest, long having since left Nyssa behind. Tegan feared nothing that the forest might hold. She just kept walking forward, walking always forward, her mind blank.

No. Not blank. She wished it was blank. She wished the fury she'd just displayed back at the beach was in any way real. Wished that she actually felt a moment of it, wished that she still cared, which was why she went further and further and took it way too far. And she knew it. So she walked away, and kept walking.

The Mara had filled her mind, showed her such awful things. Which was terrible of course, but it had done that before. Now it had just left nothing, filled her up like a balloon with hate and rage and intellect and now she felt as if she'd deflated, and her own self couldn't fill the remaining void. Such small things set her off, such odd things... she'd lost control. Again.

And she didn't really care. She didn't want to put herself back together. She just wanted to go home, except that didn't really exist anymore. She had nowhere to really go back to. Which perhaps was the worst part of all. The fact that the TARDIS seemed to have vanished and left them in this forest ripped away the last of what she had, the last familiar thing. She couldn't care anymore. So she just kept walking.

Images teased at her mind, tried to find a way in, but she just batted them aside with annoyance.

It was only when her foot stepped on something solid and warm that she paused, only came back to the world around her Nyssa called out her name – and the old man whose leg she trod on gave out a yelp.

'I'm so sorry,' Tegan bent down to help the old man to his feet, 'I was just...' it was hard to fight for words when she was realizing that what had brought her back to herself was pure old shame and guilt – her mother would be so proud. She brushed the thought aside and helped Nyssa steady him on the uneven ground of dirt and pulled grass. 'I am sorry, I wasn't thinking.' She hadn't even noticed that rain had opened up from the sky and was scattering upon the vegetation around them. The man seemed to be ignoring her, his face turned upwards towards the opening sky.

'Tegan...' Nyssa caught her arm. 'The rain...'

'What about it?' Tegan bent to pull out the needles and sticks that had wedged inside her shoes, more concerned about this silent man who lounged around in damp forests crying and how on earth she was ever going to get tree sap out of her stockings.

'Tegan- the rain, it's changing.'

It was then that Tegan saw it for herself, saw the rain patter and pelt the air around them, making everything gray and blurry... and change. The world around them was being washed away, wiped away into nothing but grey empty space.

And then they were gone. Again.


	3. Part 3 Drumlin Blues

They had travelled again. That was certain. The lake was gone, so too was the setting sun and the forest valley. But it was still damp. And cold. Very cold. Osha squatted close to the ground, as much to examine the sand as it was to warm her bare calves against her thighs. There was no soil here, nor anywhere, just said, gray sand and cobbles, with patches of lichen and scrub hugging the ground. The sky above was battleship gray and around their feet seething mists scudded about, blown by sharp, biting gusts. The landscape about them seemed to fall away, hidden by clouds and haze. All around them they could hear the sound of rushing water, but they could see no water of any kind aside from still pools and shallow mud puddles.

Worse still, several hours ago, when they'd appeared at the base of a bluff, Osha's phone had no signal at all. The Doctor, still fiddling with it, assured her that they were far beyond civilization, probably by about ten thousand years, give or take a hundred thousand or two. As disturbing as that was, Osha was far more concerned about the lack of any food or shelter. The Doctor, as far as she could tell, had no need of food for some reason, nor any of the other... subsequent functions. Again, very odd. Again, also very uncomfortable when she had to excuse herself at one point behind a boulder when nature called. The Doctor politely ignored the incident.

After wandering for some time, her stomach started to growl and she began to eye his celery stalk hungrily... "Doctor, why do you wear a rather limp stalk of celery on your lapel?'

The Doctor coughed awkwardly. 'There are several reasons, but mostly, I've found that, when in doubt, when facing friend or foe, confuse them first. If nothing else it buys you time to think of something else, even if it's just following your own instinct. Wearing a vegetable, if nothing else, tends to give people a moment's pause...' He fiddled some more on the keypad, then closed the casing of her phone and tossed it back to her. 'Now that,' remarked the Doctor, sprinting ahead, 'is odd indeed. Don't you think?'

Apparently, the strange man seemed to think he'd get farther by asking her questions than waiting for her to ask them. Common ground. Equal footing. Even though she was growing more and more certain that she was in no way his equal, Osha appreciated his gesture of respect. 'I'm afraid you're going to have to be a bit more specific,' She said when she caught up with him. He seemed to be surveying the terrain ahead.

The Doctor waved his hands in the air in front of him. 'Isn't geology wonderful? I once knew a geomorphologist named Price who once said that "attempting to interpret the origins of landforms many thousands of years after their formation and after they have been subjected to modifications by weathering and mass movement it is like asking someone to work out the plot of a 1000-page detective novel from the last five pages."'

'If only your friend thought of time travelling via rain, he'd have had a solved a good deal of mystery novels...' She studied the area before her, trying to see what he was getting at. Geology had been her worst subject at school – although she understood its merits, watching mud settle hardly seemed like an exciting career option.

The Doctor seemed to be patiently waiting, so she did what she asked her students to do during field camp: she talked it through. 'There are many gently sloping hills in close proximity; the largest, flattest of these hills has a pool of water within the depression on top, with gently sloping hills around it. The pond appears to be fairly deep, with no sign of vegetation...'

'And?'

'And...'Osha pursed her lips and blew out a poof of impatient breath. 'There is an empty stream channel leading down from it... no hang on, that can't be right... the channel that's feeding into it leads up from...'

'Downhill,' the Doctor finished. 'There is a lake on top of a hill, with no apparent drainage except for a stream that feeds it into it from downhill, which would require enormous pressure, like say...' the Doctor began to trot away in the direction of the stream.

'The stream that runs into it,' Osha began to grasp what he was getting at and the excitement make her voice quaver, 'was flowing uphill! Except of course, streams don't flow uphill.' She followed him, her steps faster and faster, forgetting the cold in her excitement. He trotted past the rolling hills and stood upon a ridge.

There was a break in the fog and Osha, for the first time, could see finally see what lay before them. The sight made her felt very, very, very small.

It was far away, but it was so massive in width and breadth that it seemed to have swallowed the horizon and bit into the sky. Osha had expected it to be white, but the huge wall before them was a dark blue gray streaked with gnashing textures of brown and black. Everywhere she looked, the massive wall seemed to stretch around them, with nothing between it and them but miles and miles of outwash plains. Thousands of shallow streams snaked and roared from the front of the continental glacier and out on the plains. Sometimes the channels slid and crossed each other, while others flowed together to form massive channels that growled and bellowed with their volume and greed for ice and sediment.

'like... say,' Osha continued, 'a stream flowing beneath a glacier two miles high?'

'Indeed,' the Doctor smiled, but he stopped her when she made to move down onto the outwash plain. 'Treacherous,' he explained, 'lots of gloop.'

'Gloop?'

'Hmmm... I agree, not very scientific, but very accurate. The soil can be very saturated, it's quite possible that you can sink up to your knees... not to mention any buried ice blocks that may have melted and the empty cavities could swallow you up whole, or outburst floods the size of the Amazon... not terribly frequent, but still... Then there's the fact that it would take us several hours to get near the ice front.' He looked her up and down and appeared to notice for the first time that she was still only wearing shorts and a light shirt. 'Besides we're not exactly dressed for it.' He swept his coat off and nestled it across her shoulders. Osha pointedly looked away from the celery. She wasn't near hungry enough to start snacking on accessories. At least not yet. Perhaps for breakfast... if they made it through the night.

'Still,' he continued 'we're on Earth, at least that's something, late Pleistocene obviously.' Still snug in his sweater and long shirt, he slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and pondered the ice face. 'Do you know, I don't think I've ever spent much time in the Ice Age?'

'Too dangerous? Too dull?' Was the best Osha could come up with. The Doctor's statements were so odd most of the time she didn't really know how to take them seriously.

'Not at all... It just always seemed far, far too... silly.' The Doctor tugged his hat tighter to his brow as the stiff wind threatened to yank it off. 'Beavers nine feet long with incisors nearly two feet in length, five hundred pound rats the size of tanks... all a bit much really.' He scanned the horizon, apparently looking for any approaching giant beavers or rats that might harass them. 'Except for the sabre tooth tigers of course... silly, but still massive, terrifying hunters, respect is due... '

'Again,' Osha interjected. 'The lack of any animal life here is very striking.'

'Yes. Interesting.' The Doctor sniffed the air. 'Do you want to know something very disturbing?'

'Only if by disturbing you mean that we may have walked past a Starbucks two miles back without noticing, then yes.'

'The level of detail, the scale, genuine subglacial landforms...I think we actually are on Earth. In the Pleistocene.'

'You did just say that.'

'No I mean, we really are. I thought- I assumed that we were still in my ship, that this was all just a construct or that we were somewhere else made to look like it, but this,' he swept his hand at the landscape before him, 'this is very real... and yet the area around the bluff where we arrived was most definitely not.'

Osha tried to establish what he was saying. 'So we are on Earth in the Ice Age, but the bluff where we arrived was something else... artificial?'

'Well, overlain on the immediate surroundings, but nothing more than a copy. I imagine that the animals pick up on the discontinuity and stay away. However, I suspect that the bluff and the lake shore are one and the same thing, they've just been shifted through time and space and reconfigured to blend into the surroundings.'

'Taking us with it.'

'Mmmmm... it's not supposed to operate that way at all... must be highly unstable.'

'And you know what it is, I suppose.'

'Indeed, old technology, from my own people, however it was meant to be deactivated millennia ago, although the details are foggy. Do you know, I think I'm finally starting to understand what may have happened. We have to go back to where we arrived, and quickly before it destabilizes again.'

The howl, when it cut the air, made Osha leap backward, away, oddly, from the Doctor.

'No animals of any kind... except giant wolves?' Osha asked nervously. She couldn't say why she'd jumped away from him just then. Just instinct. Which bothered her a bit more than that terrible wolf cry she'd just heard. As if she somehow knew that it was after him...

'Yes,' the Doctor turned and began to usher her back the way they had come, 'I think it's time we left – quite quickly!'


	4. Part 4 Who shot who in the what now?

In order to exit the now obsolete TT Type 40 Mark 3 TARDIS, the original configuration required the occupants to step through a real-world interface in order to transit from the Console Room to reach the exterior outer plasmic shell. That is to say, the doors that comprised the temporarily camouflaged exterior doors of the vessel's hull were not the same doors as those found of the main Console Room. Instead, the passengers stepped through the outer doors of the hull, through a lightless void that separated the exterior from the interior (the real-world interface) and then into the Console Room proper. This was deemed by some to be a flaw in the interior/exterior interface of these early capsules, but in reality it was a defence mechanism that the Gallifreyans had deemed necessary in order to protect themselves from the race that they had originally stolen the chameleon technology. Much like raising a drawbridge spanning a moat, the Gallifreyans could sever the interior from the exterior should the enemy breach the exterior doors. Later models and upgrades abandoned this design, primarily because by that stage the early Time Lords had wiped the race from the history of space-time. There is of course, no proof that such an outrageous genocide on the part of the Time Lords – who would never condone such a thing – ever took place, except perhaps for some obscure references in the now defunct Pydronian archives.

Documentation in the Matrix Archives does contain records from passengers of the old TT Type 40 units that described the experience of transitioning through the real-world interface in a variety of noncommittal ways. However, the word 'unsettling' appears numerous times.

Much like the Earth engineers who laid the first trans-oceanic cables that provided near instantaneous communication between Europe to the Americas, the original engineers of the TARDISes knew that the real-world interface joined the exterior and interior of the capsule, but they weren't exactly clear what lay within that dark void.

* * *

Nyssa of Traken had crossed through the interface so many times that she barely registered the experience: there was the solid, reassuring blue doors of the Police Box, then a moment of darkness, then the blinding white light and welcoming hum of the Console Room.

However, when the Cloister bells had rung at the meerkat campground and she'd stumbled after the others through the door of the Police Box and into the blackness, she experienced something different. New. Unpleasant.

Hot steamy breath on the back of her neck.

A jagged, sharp tearing sensation on her shoulder.

And then they'd appeared in the forest by the lake.

The Console Room was gone. So was the TARDIS.

And then the momentary fear she'd experienced faded in the subsequent confusion, like trying to remember the details of a dream.

Nyssa hadn't mentioned her experience to the Doctor, although she couldn't say quite why.

When the rain had come and smothered them in the forest, wiping the world around them of colour, texture and meaning, the darkness had come for her once more.

And it had pounced.

Claws tore into her flesh and slavering jaws clamped down upon her neck.

She had no time to react; no means to defend herself, no light to see by and nothing to see. The creature pierced her flesh, but there was no blood, no wounds and her breath could make no screams.

She was pinned, helpless, alone. Terrified.

The detached, irrational part of her mind was relieved. Which was interesting.

Time passed. And passed. If it passed at all. She really couldn't tell. Time seemed to have no meaning in this void in which she was trapped. The claws and jaws held her, but couldn't seem to devour her. Or couldn't decide if it wanted to...

Numb, paralyzed, Nyssa focused on the strange feeling of relief that filled part of her mind, dissected it. And was surprised.

Whatever had imprisoned her now held before her a part of her own mind to examine, a truth she hadn't been aware of: part of Nyssa had been jealous when the Mara had chosen Tegan instead of her. A being of immense intellect and evil had breached through the barriers of reality and selected Tegan. Tegan Jovanka. Of all people. It had selected her as its host.

And not her.

Yet whatever creature held Nyssa now had chosen her. It had deemed her worthy. And she felt relief.

The teeth bit tighter, the claws sunk deeper into her flesh.

_That is not a logical reaction_, Nyssa thought. _That is not who I am. I am not better than Tegan, I am not better than anyone. I am person, just like everyone else is a person._ The teeth slacked in their grip slightly, and Nyssa found strength in reason. _I wasn't even present the first time the Mara gained entry into this world, and I would never ever want to experience a violation that horrid._ She felt the claws retract. _Tegan is my friend, whoever you are. You cannot plant thoughts in my head that would betray her, the Doctor, or anyone else I care about. I have had my family, my world destroyed by a parasite like you and I deny you the satisfaction. I deny you with logic, with reason, with my heart and with everything I have ever known! _ **_GET OUT!_**

'Nyssa!'

'Nyssa, wake up!'

While having Tegan shout her awake was far from pleasant, Nyssa was nevertheless glad to see her friend looming over her. The dream, had it been one, was gone, its contents dark and murky, the details slipping away from her mind. 'What happened? Where are we?'

'Angkor Wat,' said a kindly male voice, 'or at least what's left of it.'

'I'm afraid,' Nyssa replied as Tegan helped her off the ground, 'that name leaves me none the wiser.' On her feet, she stared round to take in her surroundings, and at the old man who stood by their side.

'A temple,' Tegan explained, 'in Cambodia. On Earth.'

'Yes,' the man replied, his tone curious, 'dedicated to the god Vishnu in the twelfth century, I believe. But that was a long, long time ago. There's not much left of it now, I'm afraid. Everyone's long gone. Still, I like to come here every once in a while.'

'Apparently, he's come here several times before...' Tegan's tone wasn't particularly kind. 'You'd never believe why.'

* * *

'How can you tell where it was?' Osha found that wearing the Doctor's coat while running to be tremendously difficult. At one point, she'd tried knotting the arms around her waist, but they kept flapping loose. They were still running- well, jogging really- through gray hills, within gray mists under a slate gray sky. The Doctor was making a beeline for one gray bluff, one among many, and she was struggling to catch up. Despite having passed the age of fifty, a few times to put it politely, she had done cardio at her gym three times a week to prep for field season. However, her treadmill hadn't really had a sprint setting labelled "Chased by Wolves." Not that she would ever have pressed it anyway. She was no masochist. She was, apparently, very out of shape for the sort of life the Doctor and his friends seemed to lead. 'It all looks alike. Did you leave a mark or something?'

The Doctor paused so that she could catch up. 'Trust me, I know, I can feel it. I should have known what it was before, but I assumed it was...' There was a howl. 'Come on!' Osha cast about behind her but could see no sign of pursuit – yet they could both hear it running through the gravel in the valley behind them. The Doctor took her hand and they breathlessly stumbled down the last slope to the base of the bluff.

* * *

Nyssa was still struggling to grapple with the new location, although Tegan obviously had been awake long enough to be already be irritated by the kind old man. 'I'm sure I couldn't begin to guess what he does here...' Nyssa began. Her throat was dry, her voice quavering. She desperately needed a glass of water.

'It's easier to show you.'

They took her out to the centre of the temple, or what was left to it. While still crumbling, the ruins consisted of the crumbling remnants of five towers, four on the outside and one in the centre. A quincunx, the man had explained, gesturing at the rubble, set like the face of a die. The towers themselves seemed sad and weary, half-heartedly propping up the dark gray sky overhead. The remainder of the walls and galleries had long since disintegrated and vegetation had run rampant, although Nyssa could still see bits of bas relief cut into stone blocks gasping for air between the weeds. Mists, thick with warm humidity, drifted lazily through the forest that was slowly devouring the Dravidian architecture.

The most bizarre feature of this alien landscape, however, was a clearing in the jungle located next to where the old man had explained a moat had once lain. In this cut and groomed area, a large twenty-by-twenty metre patch of earth had been cleared, and neat rows had been dug into the freshly tilled soil.

'He comes here,' Tegan explained, 'to Cambodia, thousands of years in the future, so that he can garden.' Tegan shot the man a look of bewildered annoyance.

Not for the first time, Nyssa wondered what Tegan's parents must have been like. 'Well, I suppose gardening seems like a... harmless enough reason... at least he's not trying to take over the world.' She considered. 'Actually, it rather makes for a pleasant change.'

The man broke into a wide smile, evidently relieved that Nyssa had joined their trio. And while she loved Tegan, Nyssa could understand his relief at no longer being alone with her old friend. 'I've never met a trans-temporal gardener before,' she held out her hand, 'I'm Nyssa.'

'A pleasure to meet you Miss Nyssa,' he shook her hand warmly and introduced himself, 'Ian. Ian Chesterton.'


	5. Part 5 Close your eyes

Osha was nervously munching on the stalk of celery.

At the sound of the crunching, the Doctor cast a sharp, pained glance at her, but quickly returned to frantically touching random boulders and rocks. They had made it to the base of the bluff where they had first arrived in the Ice Age. Of the wolf, if it was still following them, there was no sign.

Not that, now that Osha thought about it, they had ever seen the creature in the first place. But the fog had pulled close about them now, blinding their view of everything in the surrounding area. They were encased by shifting clouds of gray darkness and ever-changing patches of blackness – and inside that anything could lurk.

'The instability is increasing, otherwise this should be easy. I'm not sure-,' he grunted as he heaved at a boulder, '- I'm not sure it's even possible now.'

'If there's anything I can do to help, let me know,' said Osha and huffed and puffed her way to the nearest boulder to sit and have a breather.

The Doctor waved his hands in the air, 'Simply put, very simply put, when we walked through the door of the TAR- the blue box, we should have emerged in my ship...' Osha raised her eyebrows at him, and he seemed to shift track at her reaction. 'Imagine,' he continued, 'that at the exact moment that you step through the front door of your house, that someone has swapped the house with a completely different house- except that instead of walking into their sitting room, you find yourself walking out onto their front porch.' Osha raised her eyebrows higher, just to see what he would say next. 'So instead of entering my ship, we exited the front door of someone else's ship.'

Osha finished the celery, with the exception of the leafy end bit which she tossed into the mists. 'That,' she said clearing her throat, 'sounds very complicated. I assume that there's a reason that someone would bother to do that...'

'It is incredibly complex, although it does have the rather effective result of cutting me off from my TARDIS and, I suspect the more likely reason, will result in rather disastrous consequences to both vessels.'

Osha watched him thump and kick the ground some more. 'I imagine, then, that we're currently standing at the entrance of the other vessel, and you're trying to find a way inside.'

'Mmmmmm...' The Doctor peered into a crack of a boulder and tried sticking and arm into the black crevasse. 'Well, less of a vessel, more of an observation platform, sort of. As for the pilot, well, the options are rather limited... but I doubt they're at the root of this...'

'You know,' Osha began, and paused. She was unsure if her next words were wise given the current situation. But then she thought of her new friends and decided that she had to do it, for their own sake's. 'For such a brilliant man, you are a bit of a moron.'

The Doctor stared at her, wet gray grit smeared across his cheek and along his white jumper. He looked bewildered, but not at all offended.

'I mean to say,' she tried again, 'that while you know so much of things I can't begin to dream of, you know so little about people. By 'people' I'm referring of course to Nyssa and Tegan. They don't need this, this life. It's obvious that both of them have experienced extremely traumatic events. You offer travel, you offer terror and joy, and distraction. You offer escape. Which is fine, for a while, but what people need to heal, what they need to flourish is a stable home, or a community, or a hobby, or a job, interactions with other people to mature, to grow. They're so young, Doctor.' Every time Osha looked at them, all she could think about was how old they made her feel, how short life was, and how both of them were doing nothing but running from it... and towards what? 'You know that, and I suspect, given your knowledge that you're far older than you let on, and you know that you have to do the wise thing: you have to let them go. Perhaps not now, but soon-'

If the Doctor had a response, a rejoinder, a denial, Osha never heard it for at that moment the air was pierced by another howl. Gravel from the top of bluff, invisible above their heads, shifted and tumbled, scattering pebbles at their feet.

Osha leapt to her feet and grabbed a small pen knife out of her bag and held it grimly.

The Doctor dashed back and forth across the area between them, kicking stones and slapping the sand with his feet. 'There has to be an access point somewhere, there has to be...'

From the murkiness above came a growl.

A snarl.

Then the rattle of stones as the wolf leapt at them.

It was the size of a horse. A slavering, hairy, vicious wolf-shaped horse with sharp green eyes and teeth as white and as blinding as the sun.

Osha dropped the pen knife and ran.

* * *

Nyssa was still terribly thirsty.

There was a pool of water only a few metres from them, but Nyssa doubted that her system would be able to process the parasites and vectors that this jungle's water would probably contain.

'I still don't understand,' Tegan pressed Ian, 'you travel by rain? How on earth did you do that?'

Ian frowned. 'I'm not following you.'

'When it rained, in the forest, everything went gray... everything changed, like it was washed away, and we wound up here.' Tegan gestured around at the ruined temple. 'How does it work?'

Nyssa stepped closer to the pool, trying to see if it was standing water or if there was a flowing channel that might provide a fresh source.

'The rain?' Ian still appeared confused. 'No, I journey through the portals in the Tower.'

It was only as she took another step closer to the water that she realized that it still seemed to be further away. No, not farther away, she realized, but more obscured by the mists. Alarmed, she strode back to the others. 'Tegan, the mists, they're closing about us.' She turned to Ian, 'Is this normal for this environment?'

Before Ian could respond, an eerie howl of a wolf pierced through the mists.

'What is that?' Tegan gasped. 'I don't remember reading about any Cambodian jungle wolves at school.'

Ian scooped up his trowel and seedlings, tucked them into his satchel and waved the others towards the temple. 'Come with me, it's time to go back.'

'Screw that,' said Tegan as she broke into a run, 'I don't want to go near that forest again. We've got to find the TARDIS!'

Ian had been stumbling after her and at hearing her last words nearly slammed face-first into a ruined wall. 'I'm sorry- what did you just say?'

The Doctor's hand found the right boulder. | Ian pressed a stone deep inside the undergrowth.

And they were gone.


	6. Part 6 Reunion

Osha was concerned. She supposed she should have been struck with wonder or awe at sight of the cavern that she found herself in, that they had somehow escaped the wolf, but everything was wrong. Had been wrong. That outburst, her outburst was wrong. She never went off the handle, not in decades, and what she had spouted was mostly claptrap, and something she had no right to say at all. But she had said it, and she couldn't work out why, and it bothered her.

Was it because she felt superfluous around the Doctor, in these bizarre series of worlds and situations? Possibly, but doubtful. It was hard to take someone seriously when they wore pinstripe pyjama bottoms, brilliant though they may be. It was something else, something that had twisted at her gut, made her flinch- it felt like she'd been kicked to the side like a piece of rubbish. An annoyance, an irritant. In reaction, she'd lashed out, she'd tried to prove herself. Badly.

Osha blew out a deep breath to pull herself back to the present. She looked around and was surprised to see the Doctor hugging a rather striking looking man. Odd. She'd have sworn that the Doctor wasn't the hugging type. Nyssa and Tegan were also there, in this room of doors and dark tunnels. The darkness seemed to be seeping into the room toward her, so Osha hurried to cross the cavern to join the others. A reunion seemed to be in progress, but she struggled to make out some of the conversation, as they all seemed to be talking over each other.

* * *

'Ah, Chatterton, my good man! Delightful to see you again!' The Doctor lunged across the room and shook his old companion's hand. 'An absolute delight! It's so wonderful to see you but if you don't stop what you're doing, you're going to kill us all, destroy the planet and release an evil that has been trapped since the dawn of time... Goodness, what a lovely tie you have on – Coal Hill school is it? Ever the traditionalist...'

'Ah,' was all Ian could manage. Nyssa and Tegan had informed him of this Doctor, their Doctor, but they seemed to have left out a couple of details. 'It's good to see you too Doctor – despite your appearance... I can't dream that you could be anyone else. Although, I must say that to you I must look as old as you did to me the first time we met. And for the last time, my name is Chesterton.' He wanted to sound cross, he really did but because he'd missed his friend so much, so very much since Barbara died, he just couldn't. Over the years he had encountered one or two other incarnations of the Doctor, yet meeting a new one still was a bizarre experience. 'We've known each other for more than forty years, I'd have thought you'd get the name right by now! Although I always had a hunch you'd pop up in this Tower thing. I should have know it was yours.'

'Mine? Not at all. And where's Ms Wright? I mean Barbara, is she here too?' The Doctor's face was bright and eager, somehow looking even younger than it had a moment ago.

The hopeful look made Ian's heart fall even farther than he thought possible, because he was going to destroy it, going to hurt his only remaining friend. 'She passed Doctor... Cancer... Not too long ago. Or so it seems.' It had been years though. Long, weary years. He found himself fiddling with his wedding band. The woman at the Doctor's side seemed to be scrutinizing his every move, so he tucked away his hands into his trouser pockets.

An expression of guilt flashed across the Doctor's face that was quickly replaced with a pained grimace. He didn't reply but placed a solid hand on Ian's shoulder for a long moment. Then the Doctor spun around and made for the centre of the cave. 'All right everyone, gather round, story time: Long ago, on certain worlds, the early Gallifreyans planted observatories deep within the heart of key planets.' The Doctor squatted to his knees and began pressing his palms against the floor in seemingly random patterns. 'From within these observatories, they could open portals and instantly to any point on the planet's surface in any point of its history. These were known as WatchTowers – and indeed, for a time, all they were used for was observing critical nodes in the history of the Universe. However, they were basically very primitive TARDISes, built from technology stolen from the Minyans and deeply flawed.' He paused in his search and sat back on to his haunches, rocking thoughtfully. 'While their exterior doors were capable of disguising themselves – even blending into the scenery for many kilometres around a portal entrance in order to replicate and study the outside environment, there was a key weakness: the real-world interface was unstable-'

'That's the transitional space between the internal architecture and the exterior outer plasmic hull,' Nyssa interjected for Tegan's benefit.

Tegan, however, only looked blankly at her.

'The doorway,' Nyssa tried again. 'The dark space between the doors of the console room and the exterior doors of the police box.'

'Exactly Nyssa.' The Doctor returned to randomly pressing at the floor. 'The real-world interface in the TARDIS is bridged by temporarily stitching together the exterior and interior plasmic shells momentarily to allow us passage through... However, in the WatchTowers, the space is larger, and far more unstable. But even so, safe enough, until my old friend Mr. Chesterfield comes along.'

'Chester- wait, what did I do?' Ian felt hurt that he could somehow be part of all this. 'All I've done is a spot of gardening...'

'Hmmm... yes, a bit odd in itself, but of course you wouldn't see that, not yet of course, because you see, something wanted you to find the Tower, wanted you to come here, to the control centre,' the Doctor stared up at him, almost apologetically.

Ian looked about him; saw nothing but the smooth floor of the massive cave and the hundreds of doors and tunnels leading off in every direction, to everywhen and everywhere. 'Control centre?'

'Because you are the pilot, Ian, you're the pilot. Or you would be if you weren't also carrying something on board- more of an unwitting co-pilot perhaps,' the Doctor tapped the side of his head. 'Someone wanted you to come here so that you could open a door, a door that deep down you would know how to find, one that you couldn't resist: a doorway to my TARDIS. And it took that wish, made it happen, then misdirected it, slightly, ever so slightly...' The Doctor started pressing at the space around Osha's feet, who hopped out of the way of the frantic Time Lord hands, 'You see when the doorway was created, instead of leading to the console room, or to where the police box was parked, it gave your wish a little subconscious nudge and opened up a path to the space in between. The real-world interface of the Tower and that of the TARDIS overlapped and, in addition to kicking us out of both vessels, the resulting instability is destabilizing both the TARDIS and the Tower, letting the nothing of the void seep through... and of course, eventually will result in the destruction of the planet that the Tower is rooted within...' He gave Tegan a stern glare, 'I suspect someone left the TARDIS door open for too long during our stay in Africa, providing the opportunity..'

Tegan, numb to such looks through long practice, was able to ignore the barb and squatted down next to the Doctor, trying to see what he had been squinting at. 'But what on earth for? Why bother to destroy the Tower, or the planet?'

'For?' The Doctor looked at her as if the answer was obvious. 'To free itself, of course.'

Despite the man's youthful appearance, this Doctor was just as infuriating as his older model had been. 'What? What wants to free itself? What is trapped?'

'To the Ancient Norse gods, the creature was known as Fenrir or Fenris. The Minyans named it Fenric. A terrible wolf, Fenric was the son of Loki and the giantess Angrboda and he was destined to start the end of the world, Ragnarök and slay Odin.' The Doctor stood up and strode closer to Ian. 'Knowing what Fenric was capable of, the gods tried to bind him, but he broke their free of their grasp. So they created another fetter, called _Gleipnir_. Gleipnir was fastened through two large stone slabs, called _Gjöll _and _Thiwir, _deep in the mountains. This bond Fenric could not break, as it was created from six mythical ingredients: the roots of the mountains, the sound of a cat's footstep...'

'... the breath of fishes...' blurted out Ian, although he could think of no reason why.

'...the tendon of bears...' continued Nyssa, her expression just as astonished.

'... the spittle of birds and the beard of a woman.' Tegan finished, her mouth finishing with an open 'o'. 'What the hell was that?'

'A prison described by Nordic myth, a prison that can be anything and everything that it takes to bind a god to the heart of the planet,' the Doctor strode to each of them in turn. 'I thought as much...To access the Tower requires the user to have some measure of Artron energy.' He came to stop at Osha. 'You all could have been of use, except Osha here, who's never been in the TARDIS... Ian, however,' he turned to his old friend, 'travelled with me for quite some time. Exactly what Fenric needed... he's been manipulating you all, perhaps in your dreams, perhaps in your waking subconscious. None of you were even aware of it, probably.' He tapped Nyssa's nose with his index finger. 'Don't feel too badly, gods tend to do that sort of thing. Ask Tegan.' He then grabbed Nyssa by the shoulders, lifted her up, shifted her two feet to the right, plopped her down, then crouched to examine where she had been standing. 'Here we are!' He then pressed his hands in a repeated pattern, and all around them they could hear the groan of machinery coming to life. 'The TimeLords abandoned this Tower long ago, reconfigured it to imprison Fenric... but while you can control a WatchTower via thought control, I find it's much more reliable to use the manual settings.'

Everyone started edging away from the centre of the cave in alarm as the floor and ceiling began to distort and shiver.

* * *

As the cavern around them shook and stuttered in and out of reality, Osha saw Ian stagger and tried to steady him. For a moment Osha thought she saw Ian's eyes flash blood red. She pulled back and he overbalanced, stumbling into her.

They were still in that awkward position when they saw two amazing things:

In the centre of the room a massive crystal column erupted through the floor and pierced the ceiling. The crystal was opaque, but possessed an amber hue that throbbed angrily. The Doctor lunged for the crystal and started frantically tapping out patterns on the surface.

Then the darkness of one of the tunnels lunged outward and swallowed the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan whole.

And Osha was alone with Ian.

* * *

The intruders were not unexpected. The Time Lord, Fenric had anticipated , even gleefully so. On the surface, the angry woman who accompanied him had potential, but a quick sniff revealed that her mind was badly ravaged, and traces of something malignant still remained. Fenric found the second female to be far more attractive, corruptible and entertaining. However, his attempts were thwarted by empathy, honesty and the purist sense of logic that Fenric had ever encountered. Too, she was not human, and in the past twenty thousand years trapped on this planet, the manipulation of aliens was no longer his forte. Practice, of course, never hurt anyone. Or at least not him. The eldest of the females had no scent of Artron energy and was essentially useless. Never mind. They would be useful snacks after he was freed. Australians were usually quite bold and flavourful. A Trakenite, he didn't remember ever having before. And the Time Lord would be simply delicious.

After Fenric's initial forays into their thoughts, the god returned to his most useful host: Ian Chesteron. A pawn whose dreams he had been invading for months now, Ian's grief had split his soul asunder. Fenric could slide right in and wrap himself within its thick and trembling folds, hiding in plain sight. While guiding Ian to the WatchTower had been easy, getting control of Ian's thoughts in order to open the door to the void behind the Real World Interface had been surprisingly difficult. Rich with Artron energy, which Fenric lacked, Ian was the perfect candidate for a pilot. Ian may not have consciously known he was being used, but his subconscious kept guiding the fool to anywhere but where Fenric wanted to go. Now that the Tower, the fetter that bound him, was disintegrating, Fenric could take more direct control.

For there was still one more door that needed to be opened.


	7. Part 7 Bikini Time

Osha was sitting cross-legged on the ground, Ian's head cradled on her lap. He'd collapsed after the others had gone and, wary though she was of the Wolf that she'd glimpsed in his eyes, she couldn't leave the old man's sliver head on the bare stone. Above them the crystal tower still throbbed, but weakly now, its translucent surface skittering with ever expanding cracks. The doors and tunnels that had dominated the edges of the room were beginning to fade away, swallowed by the encroaching darkness.

It was very obvious to Osha that the world was falling apart, that she was essentially alone, and that, in moments, she was probably going to die.

The fact that the thought made her feel so calm and relaxed probably should have worried her. Instead, she felt numb. Cold and absent.

'Right,' Osha said to the vanishing world around her, 'enough of that.' She pulled the Doctor's coat lapels about her neck for warmth and looked up at the crystal, looked away from the void. 'Talk it through again, just like a first year student.' The cavern had once had an echo, Osha noted, but now her words faded into the blackness around them, taking her courage with it. She tried again, patting Ian's head. 'It's just you and me. In a room that can go anywhere... except all the doors are gone.' Ian didn't respond to her words, but she could see that he was breathing, shallow but steady. He really was strikingly good looking. 'Focus, Osha, focus, don't start drooling over the man with the god-devil in his head. God's don't generally keep much in the way of retirement accounts, and also appear to have terrible manners.' That thought made her wonder if the Wolf was going to leap out of him and eat her.

'Now stop that,' she continued, giving herself a good shake. 'Try to reason it out. The Doctor said you control the tunnels with your thoughts-' she patted Ian's head, 'but hang on a moment, there's something I don't understand... before when we were in the forest... we didn't get to the Ice Age via a door or a tunnel... the exterior portal, the Doctor said, the environment just faded to gray. Like it was washed away. By the rain. Moved. And we were somewhere else' She puffed out her cheeks and sighed. 'Okay, the rain, we moved by rain, how did we move... well, the Doctor said that you're the pilot... so what about you? What about you... You're the Doctor's friend and –your wife, you lost your wife recently,' a fact Osha was ashamed to admit, that had not escaped her notice. Like the wedding band he still wore on his finger. 'So obviously, one doesn't need a degree in Psychology to know that you're probably feeling alone, adrift, possibly depressed and – oh good grief.' She peered down into his face, astonished to see that his eyes were wet with soft, slight tears. 'You were crying. You're the pilot, you were grieving, and your emotions were strong enough to rewrite this unstable world. You changed it!' Osha felt incredibly moved, even though the concept was so silly, so storybook, so clichéd, but this man's love for his wife could actually shift mountains. Unstable, artificial mountains of a disintegrating world, but moved them nevertheless.

Although Osha's own husband had passed on twenty years ago, being in close proximity to such raw emotion was quite overwhelming.

Much to her own surprise – because she simply didn't do such things – Osha found that she was crying too.

Today was full of surprises indeed. She'd forgotten how much life could hurt as well as amaze.

* * *

Plummeting through the darkness, screaming, falling, choking, nothing.

Nyssa tried, once again, to remember their latest unexpected trip through the void, but everything was slipping away again. Opening her eyes, she felt the heat of the sun on her face and the smooth contours of sand beneath her back. For a moment she thought they'd travelled back to Camp Meerkat... but instead blue ocean, gorgeous palm trees and the azure water of a lagoon stretched before them.

Which wasn't quite what she'd expected.

Nyssa pulled herself up off the beach and moved to join the others who were standing at the edge of the palm trees. The Doctor and Tegan seemed to already have been going at it; of Ian and Osha, there was no sign.

'Of course, it's very hard to know when you're winning or losing with Fenric,' the Doctor was expounding. 'Sometimes he's even planned on losing now to win later, and so on. I suppose it should be expected when you have the trickster god Loki for a father. Mind you, I've been fighting Fenric for so long in my own past and future it's hard to know whether I'm supposed to win or lose now or if it's all part of one of my plans. It's really best not think about it too much, try to just get on with it and hope for the best.'

Tegan was giving the Doctor that peculiar levelling look that Nyssa knew only too well. 'What happened? Where are we?' Nyssa, having arrived late to the discussion, tried to edge her way into the conversation before Tegan did anything rash.

The Doctor turned from staring at the tranquil lagoon and began to fiddle with the rim of his hat. 'Well, the good news is that I was able to block off any portals that would have resulted in certain death, which was actually fairly easy as they're ranked quite sensibly by the Tower automatically... no sense walking into the bottom of the ocean or during a meteorite impact for instance, at least not without the proper protection.'

'So we're safe?' Tegan had knelt to feel the sand, as if to see if it could be real and not a simulation.

'Well... avoiding certain death was easy, avoiding imminent death is rather... well, trickier, and I didn't have much time with at the Tower's central console.' The Doctor licked his finger and felt the wind. 'Judging by the salinity and the amount of artificial radio-carbon in the atmosphere, I'd imagine it's the early 1950's, and of course, judging by our friend Fenric's delight in trying to kill us, I'd hazard a guess that we're in the Bikini Atoll, right before the Castle Bravo test.'

'I don't like the sound of that.' Tegan had let the sand fall through her fingers, and was watching the horizon with a dull look on her face. Nyssa preferred the angry version of Tegan. While not particularly pleasant, at least the angry version seemed more connected to the rest of the world around her.

'Indeed, just one of the many times atomic researchers didn't get things quite right. While the dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States, it was a new type of hydrogen bomb and they vastly under estimated the yield, instead of four to six megatons, it was something more like fifteen. The result was one of the largest accidental radiological contaminations ever caused. Not a pretty sight, particularly if you're a Japanese fisherman. Their miscalculation led to fallout that reached a number of populated islands in a plume that stretched over a hundred miles wide. '

'Let me guess,' Tegan said sadly, 'we're sitting right in the middle of it.'

"I imagine we only have a few minutes before detonation, if that.' The Doctor confirmed. He knelt down and picked something up out of the sand. 'Not that we'll hear a countdown from where we are...'

'Can't we just get back the way we came?' Tegan asked, her voice edging into the realm of hysteria that Nyssa had come to know so well.

'Blocked by Fenric I'm afraid. Still, never a dull moment Tegan, never a dull moment. Now, and this is vitally important... I need you to focus: hold this coconut.'

'Doctor,' Nyssa gestured around them, 'you said that the entrances to the Watchtower can extend for anywhere from centimetres to kilometres around the entry point. Is there any chance that the entrances possess the same Temporal Grace mechanism that the TARDIS has that could prevent the detonation?'

The Doctor shook his head, then stuffed his hat into his pocket. 'The WatchTowers were put in place to watch history Nyssa, and unfortunately, in Earth's history there's very little that doesn't involve violence or weaponry. Besides, the Relative Dimensional Stabilizer field only operates within the interior of a TARDIS.'

Given that they might die at any moment in a thermonuclear explosion, the Doctor seemed oddly calm to Nyssa. As if he was patiently waiting for her to work something out. 'I understand that the early Gallifreyans reconfigured the WatchTower to imprison Fenric,' she began. 'The prison, the interior shell of the Tower, could be reconfigured to match any form, any strength, any energy...but - the concept of a prison itself implies the eventual release, or escape of the occupant...'

'Ah... yes, well.' The Doctor starting walking in a circle out onto the beach sand, his head down as if hiding a guilty look. 'To be fair, tricking him inside wasn't easy and I was in rather a hurry at the time-'

'At the time?' Nyssa was astonished at his implied remark. 'You mean you were the one that-'

'- and Ragnarok, the end of the universe, does have to happen sometime. I figured he'd escape eventually, I just wasn't sure of the when, the where, the how or more importantly, by whom.' The Doctor stood and flashed Nyssa a quick smile. 'In the end, it all comes down to who your friends are...'


	8. Part 8 The best defense

There wasn't much left of the cave any more, just the crumbling remains of the crystal column and cold, suffocating darkness. Osha had dragged Ian to the base of the crystal, huddling beside it while the rest of the universe seemed to fade away.

Alone, the aches and pains of the days exertions had started to set in and the stabs and twinges in Osha's legs and back from her earlier exertions poked and prodded her out of the cocoon of fear that held her. Getting too old for this sort of thing was putting it mildly. And yet, of all things, she missed her meerkats, their constant twittering about, and sitting atop her shoulders for a view. Always there, always part of a larger family, helping Osha to forget hers. Never alone.

Except now.

It felt odd, alien, unnatural. She wanted her families back. Either one. Let there be noise, let there be chaos, but not this, this sitting in a void awaiting death. That was why you had families; they spent all day irritating the hell out of you so you could forget about dreading the inevitable. So that there would be something left of you once you were gone. Sitting here weeping while the world blew up and the universe was to be devoured... was not something that she thought she'd be doing when she woke up in her tent this morning. If she'd known, at the very least she'd certainly have had more bacon at breakfast...

But she wasn't quite alone... once more she found herself regarding the face of the man in the void with her.

'Well... Mr. Ian Ch-' she found that she couldn't remember his family name. 'Looks like it's just you and me.' Ian's eyes flickered and twitched beneath his eyelids. 'And of course the evil god thing,' Osha correct herself. 'Oh, could you just open another door?' she pleaded. 'Just one more to get us out of here? You're still the pilot aren't you?' She rubbed her own eyes as another thought occurred to her. 'Of course, that's exactly what this Wolf wants – it wants a way out. The prison is collapsing, but it's still inside. With us...'

It was then that she saw the reflection of red eyes peering from out the darkness at them.

The Wolf was here.

* * *

Nyssa stared out at the blue green lagoon attempting to collate, compile and process. She was staring at the Doctor's back, trying to comprehend what he had said. And what he hadn't said. Something didn't seem quite right... like when Adric had tried (very rarely) to act mature... it didn't sit well, as if it was obvious that he was trying too hard to be someone he wasn't, or at least not yet.

Still, she thought as she drew in a breath of the warm, fresh air, if this was going to be the last few minutes of her life, she could think of worse places to spend it. 'It's so tranquil here... '

'Hmmm?' The Doctor didn't look up from scribbling in the sand with a stick. He had inscribed a ten foot wide circle comprised of lots of smaller scribbles and was busy retracing his steps, jotting further notes and slashes. 'It's an atoll... There used to be a volcano here, once upon a time, long gone and now a coral reef has grown on top, resulting in the lagoon...'

Nyssa examined the markings the Doctor was finishing on the circles. 'That's Gallifreyan isn't it?'

'Excuse me,' interrupted Tegan, 'but why am I holding this coconut?'

'Vitally important Tegan, vitally important.' The Doctor dusted the sand off the knees of his trousers. 'I needed you to stand just there and focus on holding the coconut- because I needed some peace and quiet to think.' The Doctor annotated the last of the circles in the sand with a flourish, oblivious to Tegan's subsequent spluttering. 'There we are, finished!'

Nyssa knelt down and traced one of the sigils with her finger, attempting to deduce the Doctor's purpose. 'So, much like the other locations, the exterior shell of the portal extends quite far out into the surroundings here...'

'Exactly!' The Doctor nodded, deftly dodged the coconut Tegan had flung at his head and plucked the TARDIS key out of his pocket. 'And, despite the raging instability of the two vessels, as a result of Fenric's meddling, both the TARDIS and the Tower are interwoven.' He moved to the centre circle. 'The instability is destroying both ships, and if the WatchTower is destroyed, so goes the Earth.'

'And this script that you've inscribed here on the exterior hull of the Tower entrance?' Nyssa asked.

'Those,' said the Doctor as he dangled the TARDIS key over the centre of one of the most complex sigils, 'are instructions to activate the Tower's emergency controls. Just requires a biometric authentication signature,' he edged back, extending his arm as far out as possible as the key began to glow.

Nyssa skipped backwards in haste as the sand beneath the key heaved and twisted, shifting in shape before it billowed upwards with a roar. There was the violent retort like the bark of a shotgun and a sharp wind bit at Nyssa's face, sand tearing at her eyes and skin. For a moment, Nyssa feared that the nuclear device had detonated, but realised at once how ridiculous the thought was. As the sand settled and she blinked her vision back into focus, to her amazement she saw before her a TARDIS console, made of _sand_ squatting on the beach.

The Doctor tapped and flicked buttons on the shifting surface of the console, sand and dust scattering to his feet as he did so... 'The nice thing about the Old Builders was that they were constantly under the assumption that the Tower would be under attack, even to the point of anticipating the possibility of a hostile takeover. Although seems like the desktop theme is having compatibility issues with the node extrusion...'

Nyssa walked closer to the console and saw, indeed, the entire structure seemed to be made of sand that was held in place by some sort of invisible architecture, or possibly force fields. In the centre of the console, where a column was, there was nothing but a heaving whirlpool of sand that descended into darkness. 'Can you control the Tower from here?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'Too unstable, the whole thing is barely holding together.' He grunted as he dashed to the other side of the console. 'We just need a small boost... Ian could help, but he isn't quite in his right mind at present. It's all a question of timing...'

* * *

The silence around Osha screamed.

Osha wasn't sure how that could be so, but it pressed at her ears and filled her head. There was almost nothing left now of the cave, except for a hunk of the crystal that flared with burning light, its pulsing building up to a blinding strobe.

She refused to look at the Wolf that prowled round them. She wouldn't look anywhere else, except Ian's face. She still cradled his head and the monster inside. The snarls of the wolf in the darkness were constant, but it had not struck. Yet.

Ian must be fighting, must be somehow keeping Fenric inside. It would have left if it could by now, she was sure of it.

If only there was something that she could do, something that she could be doing to help, anything, but she couldn't think of anything...

The quiet ~ping~ from inside her vest pocket was so banal in its everyday, mundane way that Osha nearly yelped. It was the sound of her reminder on her smart phone, a reminder that she couldn't remember setting.

She pulled out her mobile, played the audio recording attached to the reminder and swore violently. She looked back to Ian, amazement and anger filling her face. 'Forty years? You've put up with that man for forty years?' She shook her head. 'I've barely spent a week with him and he's nearly driven me insane, that complete... brilliant... idiot!'

Then she bent down, put her hands on either side of Ian's head and snogged the hell out of him.

And then, of course, the world exploded.


	9. Part 9 The Old School Spirit

"Long ago" and "far away" are not phrases that appear frequently in Gallifreyan literature. This is not, perhaps, surprising: the ability of such a species to travel to any point in time or space renders stories that begin with such words essentially meaningless. One notable exception is a portion of Gallifreyan history known only as the "Dark Times", a period that all Time Lords are forbidden to venture to - and deliberately blocked off from the continuum - following the rise of Lord Rassilon. The only remaining knowledge of the events that transpired during the Dark Times is contained within the Black Scrolls or within the apocryphal ramblings of the mystic Pythia, a contemporary of Rassilon and the Other. Much of the details of the early Time Lords and their ascent to power are shrouded in mystery and at least an entire eon of their history and knowledge has been lost forever.

Similarly, the chronology of the construction, deployment and utilization of the WatchTowers has also been subject to conjecture and rumours by historians. Abandoned during Rassilon's early rise to power and before the establishment of the first Council of Three, many of the towers were decommissioned and their locations lost forever. Some, however, have been said to persist, re-purposed to act as beacons, alarms or as Temporal Explosive Devices (TEDs) for use during the last of the Vampire campaigns.

While later time ships were imbued with a level of sentience to assist with the complexities of traversing the vortex and inter-dimensional matrices, it is unclear exactly what level was given to the WatchTowers. Vague and unsubstantiated fables have been found within the oral histories among the Sisterhood on Karn that describe WatchTowers gaining full sentience, while others tales hinted that the unstable real-world interfaces that were to shield the vessels from the void drove the spirits of other WatchTowers insane. Such rumours are, of course, absurd and should be considered with the same level of contempt reserved for similar assertions regarding the continued existence of criminals and demigods such as such as Morbius or Elvis.

* * *

'GET BACK!' The Doctor yelled, slamming down a lever. The console dropped away into a gaping blackness and the crystal sands poured down into oblivion. The Doctor grabbed Nyssa and Tegan by the hands, standing firm by the edge of the blackened pit. As if anticipating Nyssa's question he explained, 'Fenric has blocked the way back to the Tower Console room, however Ian had already opened a portal to the TARDIS's Console room, before Fenric subconsciously altered the coordinates. I've just provided instructions to alter the portal back to the original intended destination to get us back to the TARDIS... or at least I hope I have...' Standing uncertainly at the crumbling edge, the three of them peered anxiously into the dark well.

'"Raging instability"? you said,' Tegan said, her voice incredulous. 'Is it safe?

'We're standing on an island that's about to be nuked,' Nyssa pointed out bluntly. '"Safe" is a relative term.' She stepped closer to the edge, but the Doctor pulled sharply on her arm, abruptly stopping her.

'We have to time this very carefully,' the Doctor cautioned, his face deadly serious. 'If Fenric is aware that we're doing this he'll do everything in his power to stop us... we just need... a distraction.'

And then, to Tegan's surprise, he winked.

* * *

Ian was tending his garden.

His transpatial/temporal hobby had never struck him as being peculiar in the least, however now in his dream he did. He stuck the spade into the soil and sat back on his heels, observing with satisfaction the neat orderly rows that he had sown into the moist black earth. He shouldn't be aware that this was only a dream, should he? It was then that he realized that he didn't know where he was, which garden or how he'd got there. The only thing he could clearly see was the short, disciplined rows before him.

Order out of chaos, life out of nothing. Nurturing. Healing. And, according to the Doctor, fighting Fenric in his head all the while, without realizing it. Even though he didn't want to live any more, he'd been fighting. He realized that didn't want to go on, not without Barbara, not after they'd shared so much, so many things no one else would ever even believe... in his dream he was crying, gently, softly. Because he wanted to let go now, after so long, wanted to move on somehow, to stop fighting, to lie to down and let it end, but couldn't, wouldn't work out how.

From around him then, he heard voices, above and below him, from everywhere. But he couldn't make out the words. He could feel the tension creep back into his body, could feel Fenric fighting for control, fierce and persuasive, asking him for something, to go somewhere, pushing mathematics and constellations at his mind in ways Ian couldn't comprehend.

Except Ian didn't want to go anywhere, didn't want to fight Fenric or help him. He just wanted to die. To go where Barbara had gone. To escape this all consuming grief that now made up his entire dreary, life.

Fenric did not approve, he could sense it... and he was stronger, so much stronger. The sky above him grew dark, and blood began to fall from the sky in sticky, heavy globules.

Fenric began to rip Ian apart in his dreams. To tear his way out.

And because Ian didn't care anymore, because the world around him was fading away and dying too, he let him. The Wolf was upon him, devouring until -

_"...when facing friend or foe, confuse them first. If nothing else it buys you time to think of something else, even if it's just following your own instinct."_

And then another, voice weary with time but full of mischief,_'Well, I may be a grandmother, but I'm not dead from the waist down... if you're gonna go, go out with a bang!'_

- Ian didn't hear the words, he wasn't aware of anything except Fenric ripping through his lifeless flesh to tear at his heart and then... then something was happening, something Ian didn't believe, something he understood without knowing how or why... emotions long dormant came frothing up from inside of him, unbidden: anger, rage, revulsion, attraction, guilt, hope, confusion.

Ian felt himself jerking backwards, wondering why that was his reaction, puzzling, distracting, aroused, bewildered, improper, not me, what's happening someone's kissing me? Who would do that? Not Barbara. That woman? I'm married! Get off! Although, not bad. Improper! Gentleman, I'm a, never!

The claws of Fenric faltered, distracted overwhelmed by the shame/guilt of a polite/proper/ widowed Catholic school teacher/gentleman...no. A hero. A hero who has had enough of you in my head. It may not be much, but I still have some life left and there's no way in hell that Barbara would want me to give up without a fight. The garden that had been before him was gone, and in his mind he was back once more in the cave standing above Osha's unconscious body, his hands on the crystal column. 'I'm the PILOT remember?' As he spoke, he realized for the first time that it was true, accepted it and suddenly realised what he could do.

* * *

When Tegan had leaped into the hole, she expected to fall, expected to scream.

Somehow she didn't. Somehow gravity gently placed the floor beneath her feet and she was walking through the doors of the Console Room.

Except she wasn't doing that either. Because it wasn't the Console Room. Except it was.

It was the clock that struck her first. Which was odd, given how strange everything else was. 'What on earth's that awful thing?'

'Ormolu clock!'The Doctor announced proudly as he sprinted to the console. 'I'd forgotten about it actually...' The Doctor was twisting knobs and dials, his hands a blur, but his voice was calm and paced as he continued, 'Ormolu was a style for applying gold to bronze you see, used finely ground high-carat gold with an amalgam of mercury...' his hands slapped switches and rammed down buttons. 'I always found the style quite striking, but most of the craftsmen tended to die quite young as a result of mercury exposure. Speaking of, this version of the console probably still has those nasty fluid links...' The Doctor crouched beneath the console and thrust his arms into its innards.

Tegan had tuned out the Doctor's ramblings after the first few words, as she often did. His lectures were generally ninety-nine percent rubbish, containing only the occasional one-percent that she needed to pay attention to in order to save her life. Right now she was busy staring at the computer bank, carved birds, bronze column, the retro green-white console and... bird cage? 'This is definitely not the TARDIS... but it feels...like it is...'

Nyssa nodded, thumbing through a book on the French Revolution she'd found somewhere. 'It does feel right, it just looks... off.' She turned to the Doctor. 'An earlier GUI?'

'Indeed,' came the muffled response. Sparks and wires flew everywhere. 'Just a moment... Ian's original destination was the Console room of an earlier setting, but fortunately the old girl isn't strictly linear or else I wouldn't be able to do...' he grunted and yanked at something beneath the central column. There was a thump. 'THIS!' A clang. And then the world around them shifted, blurred.

Tegan felt a moment of nausea- and then they were back. In the console room. Her console room. The proper one.

The Doctor lunged forward and slammed his hands onto the telepathic circuits.

* * *

Everything was falling apart.

Everything was nothing.

Time was nothing.

Yet Ian controlled everything. Only for a moment, but a moment that he could stretch into forever. Even as the Tower was exploding, in the fraction of the moment, he had control.

He had control over everything and everywhere.

He was the Tower.

He, Ian Chesterton, was more powerful than a god.

He could no longer sense in the way he had, no longer exist within his body, could not hear or smell or breathe. But he could see everything, could be everything, anywhen.

He felt a presence beside him, around him, everywhere... the intelligence that inhabited the tower. It was there, it was helping him, but it would not join with him. Because it knew what lay inside him.

Ian could feel the beast Fenric writhing within him. Ian knew that he could crush the pathetic demigod. Or, better yet...

Ian flexed his new invisible muscles and flew open the doors of the Tower, all of them, threw them open to a point over four billion years ago and let the outside in, when the Earth was nothing more than a heaving mass of molten magma and noxious gases. The hot red fury poured into the ship, rushing forward through the void into the cave to sloshing and rolling towards the centre, to obliterate his body and the wolf-creature inside.

And then, a tingle, a murmur at the back of his mind. An idea, a simple shape from legend appeared in his head.

Ian laughed and opened just one more door.

Only one way out, one way to escape.

Fenric flinched, but would not leave. Would not take the bait.

Ian smiled then, sadly, and just shook his head gently. He looked down at Osha's body by the column, made a wish to the spirit around him, then slowly walked towards the mass of lava and hell that was writhing towards them.

As Ian strode into hell, he heard Fenric scream with rage, then he finally fled through the last door, leaving Ian's body behind.

A body that neither of them had use for any more.

With his last breath, Ian Chesterton/Chatterton/Chesterfield sighed, looked once more at eternity, and let go.

At last.

* * *

'No no no no no no NO!' The Doctor yelled, kicking and pounding the console. 'Need more time, more time, not them too, NO!'

Nyssa clung to the console as the TARDIS leapt into flight, the vessel shuddering and shaking as it broke free, roaring triumphantly into the void. If they were free, Nyssa thought, if the TARDIS was safe, didn't that mean that the Tower was destroyed, that Earth was... 'Doctor, please- .'

'To draw him out, to contain him, I sent Ian an idea, a shape, a small construct that could be built with the remains of the Tower and a portion of the TARDIS that could hold Fenric, if only temporarily. Ian succeeded in putting the genie back in a lamp... but they always tend to get out. Eventually. Fenric will no doubt resurface somewhere in Earth's timeline... somewhere.' Unlike before, the Doctor was speaking quietly, calmly, his hands no longer touching the console, just hanging loosely by his sides. As if, somehow, it all bored him. As if it was all over.

Nyssa had seen him like this once before, not so long ago.

'Ian didn't get out, did he?' Tegan asked the question. Nyssa didn't need to. 'Osha?'

'Doctor?'

'Doctor! What about Osha?'


	10. Part 10 Fate of the WatchTower

Osha had been married twice. The first time she had only been seventeen. Two kids by twenty-two. She'd stayed until her husband's alcoholism had gotten so bad that she was afraid he'd hurt the children. He wouldn't even believe her when she told him how drunk he could get, how she'd find him night after night crawling along the floor of their kitchen naked, his unconscious face pressed into the bottom drawer of the fridge. Or the passed out beside the oven that had been left on since two a.m. with a frozen pizza inside it. Osha'd found him, and the smouldering corpse of the pizza, four hours later.

Nyssa strode through Camp Meerkat, a glass of iced tea in her hands.

Tegan was reclining in her sun chair with two meerkats perched up on her shoulders, their tiny faces anxiously surveying the surroundings for predators. The students and volunteers were packing up their belongings, awaiting the land rovers that held the next team of workers. Of the Doctor, there was no sign. He hadn't been seen for days. They knew he was in the TARDIS somewhere. Mourning. Sulking.

'Thanks,' said Tegan quietly as Nyssa passed her the cold drink.

Because Osha'd loved her husband, she'd wanted him to stop, to change, to believe her at the very least, one night when he came home drunk she had a camera ready. She came down to the living room and found him urinating into the couch, speaking a nonsense language to himself, laughing maniacally. Disgusted, she took the picture but in the days that followed things got very much worse and she forgot to get the film developed. She didn't find the film until three years later, hidden at the back of a drawer along with some other unmarked rolls. She sent it off to be developed, unaware of what was in it.

'How are you feeling?' Nyssa asked.

Tegan only grunted.

'The Doctor said we'd be leaving soon... Assuming the TARDIS is fully recovered...'

No grunt. No response. Only silence.

'Will you come with us?'

Tegan sat up slightly and pulled down her sunglasses a notch to stare at her friend. 'Of course! I'm certainly not going to stay here!'

Nyssa considered, phrasing her words carefully. 'It's just that you seemed... you seemed not to trust...'

'I am concerned,' Tegan said pointedly, 'about the Doctor's behaviour. Near the end he acted like he knew what he was doing, like he had somehow planned everything- nearly everything anyway.' Tegan sat back in her chair and stared up at the sky. 'And look what happened.'

_ 'Oh, Tegan, I always have a plan... or at the very least, I'll always have my celery. And besides, planning in depth takes... practice.' _Osha had heard the Doctor say those peculiar words when they arrived back at camp.

And in that moment Osha saw the Look on Tegan's face.

When Osha got the pictures developed, she was startled to see the image of her husband. Felt the familiar wash of fear and shame of her lack of ability to stand up to him... She also noticed that the camera had captured her reflection in the living room mirror. A revealing freeze frame, but of her, not of him. In the reflection she could see herself, holding the camera outstretched as if it was tainted, as if it could bite her, and the look on her own face shocked and repelled her.

It was the same expression she saw now on Tegan's face: disgust at what her best friend had turned into and fear at what he might someday still yet become.

Osha saw this now. She saw everything now. Now that she had joined with the tower's spirit.

At least, she supposed, Tegan's reactions to events was a success in itself, a reaction. Tegan was slipping out, slowly, of the cocoon she'd encased herself in, even if it was in an unexpected, and unpleasant, way. Nyssa seemed detached, as if she had already moved on and all that was happening around her was soon about to become someone else's problem.

Osha turned away from the camp and her furry little friends, and turned her gaze to the sun and the invisible stars above, contemplating the planet that held her. Even now she wasn't one hundred percent sure of what happened or who she was. One moment she had been inside the cave with Ian, then there was an explosion of light, and then she felt... a presence, an ethereal beautiful presence, bind with her, and she was one with the Tower, with the world, with Earth.

Osha could see everything:

From long ago and far away, she could see the games laid out and played: Fenric's and the Doctor and the Other's. Saw the flask survive the molten seas and the heaving masses of continental drift, saw it wash ashore, and saw the game continue. On and on, over and over. All the broken toys strewn across the world, across space and time. When Fenric would finally be released was long past even her now extended life span and the Doctor's too.

The Tower was indeed destroyed, fading into oblivion. Vast, infinitely complex, interstitial causalities stitched into the very fabric of the Earth, however, take a very long time to fade away. It would be many millions of years for the Tower to collapse completely, and when it did the surface of the Earth would long be void of life and smouldering in the boiling embrace of the sun that had once given birth to it, and had returned to devour it. From within the world, within the crumbling tower, she could see her children, all her children, play, mate, and quarrel and, perhaps most importantly, live.

* * *

**Afterward**

**Chicago, IL 1989**

Dr. Oshadegea Cavanaugh was tired. Wealthy, yes. Overworked, yes. Suicidal... perhaps. Osha's husband had passed away three months ago. Her daughters, who had moved back in after the funeral, had left nearly six weeks ago. Osha had tried to throw herself back into her work, but dealing with petty office dramas, boardroom jousting and overpaid, emotionally vacant business executives no longer held any sense of challenge. She was supposed to be with a client now, but she'd cancelled and gone down to the park in order to munch on a butterscotch brownie. Once she'd gotten here though, she didn't even have the appetite to even do that. Sitting on a bench, she broke the treat into sticky fragments and tossed it to the birds.

She wondered if birds could get diabetes.

Decided that she didn't care.

About anything.

'Interesting things, pigeons,' said a rumbled dwarf of a man beside her. Osha didn't want to talk, didn't want to even look at the stranger. The handle of his umbrella caught her eye though. It was bright red, in the shape of a question mark. 'I wonder,' the accent was heavy with Scottish r's and thick, syrupy vowels, 'have you ever considered how complex animal societies can be? I know this wonderful place in the Kalahari that has the most delightful creatures...'

* * *

**Aberystwyth, 1992**

The woman, still bundled up in a checked coat and paisley scarf, watched the soft cough of smoke waft out from the mouth of the North Tower. She shook her head in disgust. She'd gone to so much trouble to plant the device in Ian's satchel. Without the delta wave booster, Fenric never would have been able alter the pilot's mind, nudged Ian to afix the tunnel to the proper, or rather incorrect, coordinates. And now the Watchtower was fading away, everything was ruined again.

Never mind.

The nice thing about working for Fenric was job security. There were so many plans, so many traps to set that she'd long ago lost track. She let out a sigh and stomped down the hill back to town. Next on the list, conjure up a time storm in some girl's living room. Then she had to make twelve clones. Clara Oswin Oswald pulled her coat tighter about her, and shrugged. As with all of Fenric's wolves, she was going to have a busy day.

* * *

Author's note: Thanks to all for your kind comments. This is my first stab at writing again after a break of several years, so thank you for overlooking my blunders, typos and rushed scenes. I very much missed being a part of such a kind, supportive community of writers. If you're interested in a much (much) high calibre of storytelling in regards to Fenric, Ian Brigg's novelization of the TV story is quite well done, as is the Big Finish audio tale, Gods and Monsters with Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy.


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